Various operating paradigms will accommodate providing content to a person who is previously unknown to the content provider. This, in fact, likely describes a primary operational constraint and fact-of-life as pertains to many content delivery mechanisms and approaches. As but one example in this regard, a new visitor to a Website is typically unknown to the operator of that Website. Accordingly, the content provider will typically design the initial content to be provided to such unknown persons to appeal to a fairly broad audience to thereby appeal, at some level, to a relatively large number of such visitors.
Though prior practice in this regard is not without some success, there are clearly numerous opportunities that remain unaddressed by such approaches. As one example in this regard, the content provider may, in fact, have content that would be of particular interest to a given previously unknown visitor. When this content comprises a niche interest within the overall scope of available content, however, the content provider will likely either decline to initially present this content or will present this content, along with a lot of other content of limited interest, in a way that can overwhelm, confuse, and/or frustrate the visitor.
The Personalized Uniform Resource Locator (PURL) seeks to address this problem by actually identifying the visitor to some sufficient degree to permit the landing page for a new visitor to in fact be customized to a greater or a lesser extent based upon that information for that particular visitor. Though PURLs can indeed facilitate an initial presentation of content that is more likely to be of potential relevance and interest to a given view, this approach also requires a considerable amount of front end preparation and, in some cases, considerable a priori preparation on the part of the hosting entity. Though useful for some application settings, these overhead requirements nevertheless present a substantial barrier to adaptation for many other application settings.
Skilled artisans will appreciate that elements in the figures are illustrated for simplicity and clarity and have not necessarily been drawn to scale. For example, the dimensions and/or relative positioning of some of the elements in the figures may be exaggerated relative to other elements to help to improve understanding of various embodiments of the present invention. Also, common but well-understood elements that are useful or necessary in a commercially feasible embodiment are often not depicted in order to facilitate a less obstructed view of these various embodiments of the present invention. It will further be appreciated that certain actions and/or steps may be described or depicted in a particular order of occurrence while those skilled in the art will understand that such specificity with respect to sequence is not actually required. It will also be understood that the terms and expressions used herein have the ordinary technical meaning as is accorded to such terms and expressions by persons skilled in the technical field as set forth above except where different specific meanings have otherwise been set forth herein.